


hanged skies and drowned oceans

by mouseymightymarvellous



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Complicated Relationships, End of the World, F/M, Grieving, Naruto Rare Pair Bingo 2019, Older Characters, Past Character Death, Transhumanism
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-27
Updated: 2019-06-27
Packaged: 2020-05-20 17:27:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19381363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: Sakura was eighteen the first time they strapped her into a divesuit and tossed her into a Jaeger. Not because she was the smartest or the fastest or the strongest, but because Jaeger pilot teams are three pilots, and Sakura had the particular gift of being able to drift with anybody.Sakura is thirty-six now. She hasn't stepped foot in a Jaeger for fifteen years. The ocean waves are rising to swallow them whole, though, and Sakura still dreams of lightning at her fingertips.Where would you rather die?Sakura has been two thirds dead for fifteen years, now.Maybe it is finally time for a little bit of resurrection. Maybe it is finally time for one last death.





	hanged skies and drowned oceans

**Author's Note:**

> _(“what if a much of a which…”) by e.e. cummings, from July 1943_
> 
> what if a much of a which of a wind  
> gives the truth to summer’s lie;  
> bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun  
> and yanks immortal stars awry?  
> Blow king to beggar and queen to seem  
> (blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)  
> —when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,  
> the single secret will still be man
> 
> what if a keen of a lean wind flays  
> screaming hills with sleet and snow:  
> strangles valleys by ropes of thing  
> and stifles forests in white ago?  
> Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind  
> (blow pity to envy and soul to mind)  
> —whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,  
> it’s they shall cry hello to the spring
> 
> what if a down of a doom of a dream  
> bites this universe in two,  
> peels forever out of his grave  
> and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?  
> Blow soon to never and never to twice  
> (blow life to isn’t: blow death to was)  
> —all nothings’ only our hugest home;  
> the most who die, the more we live

Sakura is dreaming up prosthetic prototypes that will never come to be and ignoring the persistent head ache that has been lurking at the top of her neck for the last four days when the lab’s secretary pages her to let Sakura know there’s a commodore here to see her.

It’s technically her lunch break, but Sakura is technically but a lowly wing commander (Head of Experimental Medicine, notwithstanding), so she glumly tosses her picked at salad back into her mini-fridge, saves her files, locks her computers, and heads out of her office to the lab’s front door.

H.A.L. is whirring fairly loudly in the background of the usual quiet chatter, and Sakura checks the mental clock in her head—one of several—that keeps track of expected end times for the various models they regularly run. If all goes well, they should be getting some results in fifty-two hours. If all doesn’t go well, they’ll probably know in the next twenty-four.

Raoul waves Sakura over, but she shakes her head.

“Sorry, but there’s a commodore waiting for me outside. Ask Pavarti; I don’t know when I’ll be back in the lab.”

Raoul makes a sympathetic face at her, and Sakura laughs.

They’re all here and technically part of the PPDC, but the doctors and scientists Sakura works with don’t usually care much for their military rankings (or their military superiors).

Sakura doesn’t either, these days, but she’s unfortunately found herself with the debatable luck of being a science division department head, and so she finds herself doing a lot more politicking and interfacing with the more militant facing side of their organization than she had originally planned when she dove into medicine and forgot about the rest of the world.

Marguerite is scowling at the back of the Commodore, shuffling papers industriously at her desk.

Sakura cannot be unconvinced that Marguerite was Black Ops before she was drafted to the PPDC, and that Command stuck her on the scientists as both guard and babysitter.

Marguerite looks like she might slit the commodore’s throat with the papers she’s fingering, and Sakura’s first thought when he finally turns around to face her is that she wouldn’t stop Marguerite if she wanted to have a go.

“No,” Sakura declares, and turns on her heel to storm back into the lab where, commodore or not, no one enters without the right authorization.

And then, like the bastard he is, Shikamaru says, “Sakura,” with a tired and near heartbroken tone that sounds all too close to the way he said her name when he’d hobbled his way into her lab fourteen years ago, still bleeding slowly from a head wound and wearing half his ruined divesuit, to tell her that Ino was dead.

Sakura freezes with her hand over the door scanner, skewered by the memory, still as vivid now as it has ever been.

She lets her hand fall to her side.

“Alright,” she murmurs, “alright.”

Sakura turns around to face her past and the future it has wrought for all of them.

He looks the way his eyes always did, now. Greying at the temples with bruises pressed under his eyes, turning them even more shadowed.

His uniform is as neat as ever, even if the rank insignia is different.

She’d heard about his promotions, of course, but Sakura hasn’t seen him in person in years. The last time has been across a crowded meeting, and Shikamaru had dutifully avoided catching her gaze, even if she could see the tension in his jaw.

Sakura wonders, briefly, what he sees when he looks at her, which versions of herself he finds reflected in the woman who stands before him, before she swats the thought away.

“Can we speak in your office?” he asks, finally.

“No,” Marguerite declares, “authorized personnel only.”

Sakura starts. She’d forgotten they had an audience.

Marguerite looks equal parts defensive and intrigued, and Sakura groans internally.

The lab staff is protective, but they’re also irreverent gossips.

She’s going to be fielding subtle and not-so-subtle inquiries for weeks, because while they don’t appreciate outsiders trying to bother their department head about her past, apparently they don’t share the same compunctions about their own curiosity.

“Ah,” Shikamaru says.

He doesn’t have to sound so amused.

“You have a temporary office on base,” Sakura says, more of a statement of fact than a question.

She can’t believe she didn’t know he was in the Shatterdome. That she hasn’t heard means that he’s only just arrived, but still.

What use is encouraging the scientist gossip network if it doesn’t give her advance notice of her ghosts returning from where she’s buried them?

Shikamaru nods and turns to start walking down the hallway.

Sakura grits her teeth.

She wonders if its his rank that makes him assume she’ll fall into step at his shoulder or if its old muscle memory.

She wonders if he even realizes he’s done it.

Except, as he looks pointedly over his shoulder at her, Sakura remembers that this is Shikamaru.

It’s been fourteen years, but she can’t imagine he’s become the sort of person who would forget.

(They have that in common.)

Sakura’s hands flex at her sides, but she strides to catch up.

Behind her, Marguerite snorts in disapproval.

Sakura can’t say she disagrees.

It’s easy to fall in step with Shikamaru.

But then, well, Sakura has fifteen years of practice walking step-in-step with her ghosts.

 

 

Shikamaru’s office is in one of the various hallways of the wing that houses Command staff. It is, unsurprisingly, completely empty but for the furniture and the computer on the desk and the ubiquitous paperwork that powers the PPDC.

Shikamaru sits behind the desk, leaving Sakura with one of the two chairs. They look like the kind of uncomfortable that is just short of tortuous enough to properly deter anyone who might want to draw out a meeting too long.

Sakura wonders if he put the desk between them out of habit, out of strategy, or out of a discomfort in sitting next to her.

Knowing Shikamaru, it’s quite likely all three bundled up into an explanation that makes him feel in control.

Sakura isn’t fourteen anymore. Not fourteen or nineteen or twenty-two. She knows the shape of her insecurities more intimately than any lover, and she’s old enough now to see around them.

Sakura isn’t the only one face to face with one of her ghosts.

Shikamaru may be a commodore now, but Sakura has never forgotten his tells. He still flexes his jaw the same was as he ever did when he was uncomfortable with a situation.

He never did like to admit to tears.

Of all the things, it’s his discomfort being here, with her, that sets Sakura at ease.

Well, not ease. But it’s easier to slip on a mask of professionalism. To pretend to be only Wg. Cdr. Haruno, as far from Sakura or even Fg. Off. Haruno as she can manage, when she’s not being Dr. Haruno. Easier to pretend that just the sight of Shikamaru is tearing at old wounds.

He wouldn’t be here if he didn’t have to be.

Sakura can handle a crisis.

After all, there’s no one left to lose but herself, and that’s been a long time in coming. There’s nothing that Shikamaru could tell her that she has not survived worse.

And then, like always, Shikamaru goes right ahead and subverts her expectations.

“We’re losing,” he says.

As Sakura sits back in her uncomfortable chair in this blank office, she wonders why no one in her life has ever been as good as ripping the world out from under her feet.

Maybe, she thinks, it’s because Shikamaru is the only one left alive to do it.

“Pilots are dying faster than we can train them,” Shikamaru presses on. “And the Kaiju are adapting too fast for the Jaegers to keep up, especially with virgin pilots at the helm.”

“How long?” Sakura whispers.

She hasn’t paid attention to the day-to-day ongoings of the Shatterdome in years, not really. She hadn’t realized it had gotten so bad, content with her experiments and her patients.

She watches them bring in the screaming pilots, screaming for their missing limbs and their missing parts, and she patches them back up again or pulls the shrouds over their heads, and it’s been years since she’s dared count them, or even remember their faces. She hasn’t had the heart for it in years.

How has it gotten so bad?

How could she have let it get so bad?

Naruto would be ashamed of her.

“Sixteen months,” Shikamaru answers. “If we’re lucky.”

Sakura sucks in a breath through her teeth.

Her hands are trembling on the arms of her chair. She curls her fingers around them instead, letting her nails bite into the plastic.

“Why,” Sakura manages around the slow rising scream in her mouth, “do you need me?”

Why now? Why not fourteen years ago when Sakura still could barely get out of bed and couldn’t remember sometimes that she was made of flesh and blood and bone? Why not twelve years ago when Sakura would spend entire nights in the Kwoon, beating her fists bloody on a heavy bag when no one was willing to spar with her anymore? Why not nine years ago when Sakura still couldn’t make it through a full week without having to bury the ghosts rising up in her head?

Shikamaru, out of everyone, despite everything, was always able to read her best.

Why couldn’t he read the pleading desperation in her eyes even as she screamed at him, still broken and bloody in the doorway of her room, to go away, to leave her, to bring Ino back because how dare he live to come back without her?

Sakura doesn’t wake up in the night anymore, screaming for them. She doesn’t accidentally grab blades with her bare hands anymore. She doesn’t have unburied ghosts in her head anymore. She doesn’t need him anymore.

Why now?

“Because we need pilots,” Shikamaru finally says into the quiet. “And the only pilot Chidori will accept is you.”

And then, like it’s been threatening to do for the last four days, the headache at the top of her neck explodes into the sound of a thousand screaming birds, and Sakura is lost.

 

 

There was a documentary, years ago now, about the start of the Jaeger program.

It was mostly based on speculation, news stories, and what few retired or decommissioned officers they could find who were willing to talk.

Sakura didn’t watch it.

It was all going to be nonsense, anyways, and she couldn’t bear it.

But she’d stumbled into one of the commercials for it that seemed to be omnipresent for a while, once, when flipping between news channels.

“To fight monsters,” the narrator said, “we had to become monsters.”

Sakura stands in an empty white space. The shallow water is soaking through her socks.

Sakura closes her eyes and tries not to sob.

No.

She thought she was free of this.

It’s been fifteen years since she last strode into Chidori’s cockpit. Fifteen years since Sakura last towered over the ocean, three hearts beating firmly inside her metal skin.

Sakura stands at Chidori’s feet, looking up and up and up, and she wants to scream for how wrong it is, to not be with her, her heart their heart, breathing and fighting as one.

How has her heart beat on, these long years, all alone? How has she had the strength to breath when it has been just her in her head?

Sakura and Chidori and Chidori-Sakura had _screamed_ when they were ripped from Her. She had lay in her hospital bed and in the repair bay screaming. She had screamed her throat raw, until the servers blew.

They’d had to sedate Her and remove Her remaining arm because She couldn’t stop sparking lightning.

They’d _taken_ them from Her. They’d taken her hearts and She hadn’t known how to go on without them except for the way She had kept fighting until They were dead, kept fighting into they were scraps on the waves.

And then Sakura had _walked away_ , like they hadn’t taken Her legs away.

Chidori had screamed when Sakura cut and hacked and slashed the bond between them, until it was a ragged, broken thing, less than mere threads.

And Sakura had wept to do it. Wept for this final loss. Wept for killing Herself.

She’d wanted to live.

Naruto was dead and Sasuke was dead and She was dying the slow, hollow death of the damned, and Sakura had wanted to live.

So she cut and hacked and slashed what bond was left until She’d died from it.

And yet, here Chidori is, towering over her, pressed soul-close, soul-deep.

Sakura doesn’t dare look around, afraid of who she’ll find, afraid of who she won’t find.

Sakura doesn’t dare look down, where lightning is dancing at her fingertips.

Chidori is crooning, and Sakura’s throat vibrates in tune.

“We had to become monsters,” the narrator had intoned in his deep, almost accent-less voice.

Oh, they had no idea how right they were.


End file.
